Review: The Boy Kings

The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network
By Katherine Losse.
Free Press, 256 pp., $26.

Reviewed by Alice Tao

Most everyone knows about Facebook, but not many people can truly grasp the impact and power of this ever-expanding social network.

Many of us learned about the company from the film “The Social Network,” which was based on the book “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich.

“The Boy Kings,” by Katherine Losse, presents a more personal narrative of the company’s development. It’s a dark, even dangerous, gilded tale.

Tempted by a Facebook bulletin asking for interested job seekers, Katherine Losse applies and is accepted to work at Facebook as a customer-support representative. She is employee No. 51.

Among an overwhelming number of male engineers — fueled by testosterone and the determination to code a virtual world — Losse observes, sometimes bitterly, the unbreachable gap that separates the technical and the nontechnical. At the same time, Losse is intoxicated by the revolutionary environment at Facebook and hopes to obtain her place in the empire built from youth and ambition: “Everyone wanted to be king, first, myself included. The rest could follow.”

With this mind-set, Losse rises to the position of internationalization product manager. She travels the world to help translate Facebook pages into different languages and eventually becomes Mark Zuckerberg’s ghost writer, blogging and emailing in the founder’s voice.

Yet throughout her Facebook career, Losse longs for the rough edges and tangible relationships of the physical world, rather than the flawlessly coded Utopia worshipped by Facebook engineers.

Although the narrative is chronological, frequent references to different time periods and the inclusion of so many technical terms can make the plot difficult to follow. Nonetheless, the intimate personal voice behind the story sheds some light on the shadows lurking at the heart of Facebook.

Alice Tao is a student at Bellaire High School and an intern with the Houston Chronicle Classroom.